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With the increasing dissatisfaction with Apple's long approval process and seemingly arbitrary rejections, iPhone developers have been looking to alternatives to the App Store. The "gatekeeper" approach has been a boon to the jailbreaking community, as new marketplaces come up to offer healthy competition and user choice. We recently highlighted one independent App Store, Rock Your Phone, when they released their 2.0 version. The founder announced today that they're headed for $2 million US in revenue in the coming year.

As the source for popular, powerful apps like MyWi and My3G, RockYourPhone delivers the functionality that power users need but aren't getting from Apple and AT&T. In a press release today, RockYourPhone shared some of the kudos they're getting from happy users.

With a whole bunch of new technology coming out today, and the competition around the "smart phones", this is the kind of stuff that makes the iPhone stick out.

I wanted to view my email, text messages, and calendar at a glance. Apple doesn't sell an app like this and my blackberry had it out of box. It's essential for my work - $10 is a no-brainer for the productivity it provides.

Mario Ciabarra, Chief Technical Officer and company founder, noted that the independent marketplace was filling an obvious need as indicated by rising sales. "We're on target for $2+ million in revenue over the next 12 months" Tom Cross, the CEO, says that RockYourPhone is "receiving about 10-20 developer applications a day - some defecting from Apple's restrictive control."

The company related the experience of a developer, named ZodTTD, who is selling his app exclusively on Rock Your Phone and is on track for $30K in the first month. The developer found he had a greatly improved ability to both market and track his sales with RockYourPhone.

I get fast updates with instant feedback via a review system, quickly updated statistics of sales and downloads, and none of Apple's bureaucracy. While this sort of application can get 50,000 downloads on Android Marketplace over the course of months, I reach those numbers in a matter of days.

RockYourPhone is not just for paid apps: they are working to be a complete jailbroken package management solution, incorporating paid to free packages. They list all packages from all default Cydia sources as well as their own paid apps, and maintain an updated list of packages from ModMyi, BigBoss, Saurik, Ste, ZodTTD, and iSpazio repositories on their own RockCentral server, and only changes are downloaded to Rock App users, which results in faster, more accurate listings.